Contesting concepts - Epistemic disobedience at BCIS

The Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) was 50 last year. It was a cause for celebration and spawned, among other things, the Festival of Ideas where BCIS created an open space for engagement with a wide range of new stakeholders. It was also the year that we applied for and successfully secured institutional accreditation with the Ministry of Higher Education and acquired degree awarding status.

- BY PRIYANTHI FERNANDO

Tn 2025, one year into the next half century of our existence, we are working on creating opportunities for our students, our lecturers, our staff, our governing body members and our public constituencies, to become familiar with new, challenging trends in the global conversations around international relations. We are aiming to strengthen our capacity to reexamine some of the well-worn concepts of international relations theory, engage with global south perspectives and alternatives, decolonise our epistemological leanings, vary our pedagogical practice and create a dynamic, critical international relations community.

The importance of this endeavour cannot be underestimated. We are at a point globally where the conventional Realist concepts of International Relations predominantly defined through the vantage point of the state—state-centrism, anarchy, national interest, security, and power politics—are playing out in ways that increasingly disregard established international norms, and are losing their resonance in a context where technology, the climate crisis and other predicted and unpredicted anthropogenic factors, are influencing diplomacy, state relations, and peoples’ lives and livelihoods.